It was a Sunday afternoon during a very hot, late June in the Mississippi Delta. Although, I never knew a June, or any other summer month in Mississippi, that wasn't hot and humid. That week we would leave the air-conditioned house for the air-conditioned car to go to an air-conditioned restaurant. Those brief moments in the un-conditioned air seemed like a stray visit to a sun.
So, with little to do that day, as Sundays are still honored in the south, we drove 150 miles or so to the northeast, meandering through the infamous crossroads of Route 49 and Highway 61, the place where Robert Johnson met the devil and was given, however temporarily, his prowess at the guitar, and through the small town of Clarksdale that has produced so many musicians, seven of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from Sam Cooke to Ike Turner to Howlin' Wolf to John Lee Hooker, that the list of their names makes up the bulk of the local chamber of commerce's webpage.
That wasn't our journey's end, however. As much as the blues have defined the nature and reality of life in that part of the American South, there was another mecca, to be found sixty miles to the east, that delivered Southern art, grace, and aesthetics, indeed the foundation of all of those chords and laments, to the rest of the world. As Mississippi also brought forth its share of writers, including Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, and Tennesee Williams, the Magnolia State also produced he who is arguably the most influential of them all, particularly on the world's stage.
Rowan Oak was for over thirty years, from 1930 until his death in 1962, the home of William Faulkner. It was here that he would write many of his novels and stories, and from which he would receive notice that he had won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Those prizes discomfited Faulkner, however, as he preferred the peace of his tumbledown manor and its overgrown garden.
In fact, it was that garden and its maze that first attracted our attention as we parked in a gravel drive and looked along the cedar-lined path that lead to the gracious front porch. I was glad, since our own car frequently carries with it the tools, accoutrements, and accessories necessary to maintain my wife's elaborate and demanding gardens, that we were in my father-in-law's borrowed Buick. The first thing my wife said was, "This needs weeding". Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean around six hours fussing with someone else's garden. Since my father-in-law's trunk carried nothing other than a spare tire, I was in luck and could actually expect to see something of the house.
Except that Rowan Oak was, by our visit, under the care of the University of Mississippi as a literary landmark and its hours of operation were quixotic. As it turned out, although I had been assured that visitors were welcome on a Sunday, that meant to the parking lot, maze, and garden; and not the actual house. I amused myself by sitting on the front porch and remembering Faulkner's literary observation that, "Yesterday, today, tomorrow, are is indivisible, one", and thought about porches and peace and what it was to have a place apart from the world.
When I saw my wife starting to think about ways of using a tire jack for a gardening tool, I briskly escaped to the back of the house, thought "What the heck?", and tried the kitchen door. It was unlocked. Ah, the South.
There, for an hour, without a guide, overseer, or guard, I was on my own to wander around Rowan Oak, to see even the parts that weren't prepared for public viewing. While my wife meandered about the garden and maze, I ghosted through the kitchen, sitting room, telephone nook [with the number "Oxford 1-8110" scribbled on the wall] and, particularly, the room in which Faulkner wrote. The most spectacular feature is the character outline of his novel, A Fable, written into the wall.
[Really, what was it with this household? Was there a shortage of paper in Mississippi in his day?]
For those interested in architecture, we offer the following from the official pamphlet:
It is a primitive Greek Revival house built in the 1840s by Robert Sheegog. Faulkner purchased the house when it was in disrepair in the 1930s and did many of the renovations himself. Other renovations were done in the 1950s. The house sits on 4 landscaped and twenty nine acres of largely wooded property known as Bailey's Woods. Though the "rowan oak" is a mythical tree, the grounds and surrounding woods of Rowan Oak contain hundreds of species of native Mississippi plants, most of which date back to antebellum times. The alley of cedars that lines the driveway was common in the 19th century. The studs of the house are 4"x4" square cypress, which were hand-hewn. Faulkner drew much inspiration for his treatment of multi-layered Time from Rowan Oak, where past and future seemed to inhabit the present.
In 1972, his daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, sold the house to the University of Mississippi. The University maintains the home in order to promote Faulkner's literary heritage. Tours are available. The home has been visited by such writers as John Updike, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Simic, Richard Ford, James Lee Burke, Bei Dao, Charles Wright, Charles Frazier, Alice Walker, the Coen brothers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Salman Rushdie, and others. Writer Mark Richard once repaired a faulty doorknob on the French door to Faulkner's study.
Rowan Oak was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1968. After its most recent renovations, some of which were funded by part-time Oxford resident and Ole Miss law school alumnus, John Grisham, Rowan Oak was rededicated on May 1, 2005.Well, that explains why my memory, while seated on that porch, was drawn back to that quotation from Faulkner about time and its nature.
Despite the heat and the drive and the sudden realization that we were in Mississippi on a Sunday, which in those days meant no place to eat or drink in Oxford, it was one of the best moments of our many visits to the deep South. We meandered, we walked, we appreciated, and, through the hospitality of Faulkner's ghost leaving that back door unlocked, we gained a sense of that old, gracious style of life that he captured so well in his work.
